Zagreb lawyer Marin Ivanovic, a member of the defence team representing General Ante Gotovina before the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, has been cleared of the charge of concealing or destroying archival material, namely military documents relating to a 1995 military offensive known as Operation Storm.
Ivanovic told press on Thursday that on Wednesday he had received a copy of the judgement of the Zagreb County Court acquitting him on appeal. He said he was pleased with the outcome, but declined to discuss the case.
In July 2010, the Zagreb Municipal Criminal Court acquitted him of concealing a diary kept by Ante Kardum, commander of an artillery group during Operation Storm, which contained a list of targets and several military maps that Ivanovic collected for the purposes of Gotovina's defence.
The trial court found that Ivanovic had not concealed the documents, noting that they had been submitted to the Hague tribunal as evidence, and added that it could not be reliably determined whether those documents qualified as archival material at all. Judge Sanda Bramberger-Ostojic said then that even if it was archival material his intention was not to conceal the documents but to do his job as a lawyer defending his client.
The prosecution filed an appeal against the trial court judgement, but the Appeals Chamber of the Zagreb County Court threw it out and upheld the acquittal.
